Minimal Indispensable Feature Set

Monday, August 10th, 2015

Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is such a nice idea. Let’s build something that is as small as possible and at the same time viable, which translates to “provides value and thus make sense to build it.” Sometimes, the viable part of the MVP would be ignored. Much more frequently though the way people understand MVP has virtually nothing to do with the minimal part.

Today, we can consider MVP is in the top 5 most abused terms. By now referring to MVP is mostly meaningless unless you ask a series of questions to understand what one means by that. Maybe we need another frame for discussing what the initial increment of a product is.

Let’s step aside from discussing what is minimal and what is viable. Let’s figure out which features will be the part of the product in every single, even most crazy, scenario that we can think of, the set of features that is a common denominator for all the options of building the product. A core process, a basic idea, an ultimate issue that the app attempts to solve.

We don’t try to settle on what is viable and what is minimal. We simply go with something that we know will be useful.

Summing-up: Minimal Indispensable Feature Set (MIFS) is perfectly aligned with building an MVP. In fact it is a subset of an MVP. At the same time it addresses the part of the setup that goes way beyond simply defining of what product is.